Originally Posted by wolfing
It's like they forced the developers to think of ways to make the game only available online, not for the good of the game, but to reduce piracy.

I am not sure they forced the developpers to think that way. The developpers might have come to this by themselves. City builders are somehow an abandoned genre. Quite some time between the last Sim city and this one. In the meantime, the few that tried to fill (less than five, I think), one already moved to the MU gaming: cities XL.

One key question here is to determine what room of improvement the developpers felt to be available for that genre while maintaining an exclusive SP approach.
Good thing with the multiplayer approach, it adds a lot of coding and maintenance job to code things like interaction between players etc

I am not sure how the game mechanics were moved forward if they were.

One thing is sure: this approach added work that was immediately available for the developpers to do.